In autonomous and self-driving vehicle news are Ford, Hesai, Westwell, Plus & Ambarella.Ford BlueCruise Approved in Europe
Hesai Ldar for Westwell
Hesai Technology announced that it has entered into a strategic partnership with Westwell, a global provider in autonomous driving solutions, to provide lidar in applications including autonomous driving, industrial robots, heavy machinery, and smart cities.
Westwell’s autonomous driving solutions will be equipped with Hesai’s advanced lidar products and serve over 200 corporate clients across 20 countries. Westwell’s collaboration with Hesai will also bring higher productivity to the supply chain, significantly enhancing efficiency and quality while reducing carbon emissions on a global scale.
Hesai’s lidars are already integrated into several of Westwell’s solutions, including their new energy-efficient autonomous driving Q-Trucks and Q-Tractors. Westwell has the largest fleet of Q-Trucks at Felixstowe Port in the United Kingdom and has deployed Q-Tractors to support Hong Kong’s largest independent air cargo operator, Hong Kong Air Cargo Terminals Limited (HACTL). Their Q-Trucks are also used in advanced manufacturing plants to improve transport efficiency and green carbon reduction.
Westwell’s R&D team uses a multi-sensor approach, equipping multiple Hesai’s XT32 and AT128 lidars for each of their vehicles, ensuring precise operations across various scenarios. Westwell’s autonomous driving Q-Trucks and E-Trucks use Hesai’s XT32 mid-range lidar, with impressive 5 mm range precision. The lidar provides high-quality point clouds and optical systems, enabling operable data and accurate vehicle alignment and interactions. Additionally, sensors in port scenarios are susceptible to frequent vibrations, salt corrosion, and frequent stops. The Hesai XT and AT series’ transceiver modules are based on Hesai’s proprietary technology, effectively reducing failure rates and maintenance costs.
Beyond logistics, lidar empowers industrial robotics by providing precise distance, speed, and imaging data, facilitating accurate positioning, obstacle avoidance, and navigation in complex environments. Hesai lidars are widely used in autonomous delivery robots, forklifts, and lawnmowers.
Westwell has partnered with Hesai for lidar solutions since 2018. As two innovative companies with a global reach, they have made significant accomplishments in lidar technology and intelligent solutions. Through their latest strategic partnership, Hesai and Westwell will continue to enhance product performance, providing efficient and reliable intelligent solutions to customers worldwide.
PlusVison for Ambarella CV3-AD
Ambarella, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMBA), an edge AI semiconductor company, and Plus, an AI-based driver assist and autonomous driving (AD) solutions provider, announced that Plus’s PlusVision™—a high-performance transformer-based AD perception software stack with industry-leading power efficiency—is now available on Ambarella’s CV3-AD AI domain controller family of systems-on-chip (SoCs), which provides industry leading AI performance per watt. This state-of-the-art perception offering will help Tier-1 suppliers and carmakers to accelerate the launch of next-generation vehicles with L2+/L3 autonomy.
PlusVision is the transformer-based, deep neural network AI perception software that combines Plus’s L4 perception capabilities with an extensive and diverse dataset. Plus’s AD stack has accumulated millions of real-world driving miles in the U.S., Europe and Australia. This data collection has made PlusVision smarter, enabling incredibly information-rich output that helps OEMs develop and fine-tune detailed autonomous driving policies. Implementing uniform perception software is key to enabling these data-driven, custom policies across different vehicle models and trim levels.
“We are delighted to collaborate with Ambarella in offering PlusVision’s leading-edge perception capabilities on their CV3-AD SoCs,” said David Liu, CEO and co-founder at Plus. “This combination will provide Tier-1s and OEMs with a flexible, high-performance and power-efficient perception solution, enabling them to create a future-proof platform that can be adapted for their evolving autonomy needs.”
“Our collaboration with Plus offers Tier-1s and OEMs additional cutting-edge transformer-based AI perception software solutions, to help accelerate their next-generation vehicle development,” said Fermi Wang, president and CEO of Ambarella. “This is a pivotal time for the automotive industry, and solutions like this give Tier-1s and OEMs the flexibility to efficiently differentiate their offerings and maximize customer value.”
The PlusVision stack, running on a mid-range CV3-AD655 SoC, is capable of delivering peak performance of 11 cameras being simultaneously processed at 30 frames per second. This solution provides more than 200 meters of front-camera detection range, enabling the long-distance perception that is crucial in high-speed driving conditions.
The CV3-AD SoC family offers industry-leading low power consumption while providing advanced image processing and superior AI performance per watt. The Plus and Ambarella teams collaborated to optimize the transformer-based PlusVision model for the CVflow® AI engine inside the CV3-AD SoCs, which provides an optimal solution for AD systems with high performance, low latency and low power AI processing. Additionally, the CV3-AD family’s efficiency helps increase battery range in new electric vehicles and its optimized processing performance provides OEMs with additional headroom to integrate other software and create differentiated features.
Mobileye for Zeekr
-Building on the success from their collaboration over the last several years, Zeekr and Mobileye have announced their plan to accelerate technology localization in China, integrate Mobileye technologies into the next-generation Zeekr models, and further their state-of-the-art driving safety and automation there and in the global market.
Since the end of 2021, Zeekr has delivered more than 240,000 Zeekr 001 and Zeekr 009 vehicles, powered by the Mobileye SuperVision™ platform, to customers in China and globally. To be more responsive to the growing customer demands in China, the companies intend to accelerate the scaling and delivery of core underlying technologies for the Mobileye SuperVision platform.
Zeekr will be able to use the powerful road intelligence technologies for any of its vehicles. The expanded collaboration will enable Zeekr engineers to better utilize Mobileye’s technologies and development tools to conduct validation of data and more efficiently deliver software upgrades to customers. Additionally, the collaboration will accelerate comprehensive automated driving solutions roll-out for other Mobileye customers in China.
The joint effort will also locally tailor other key Mobileye technologies such as the Driving Experience Platform (DXP), a collaborative tool that enables automakers to customize automated driving styles and customer experience. Moreover, the companies will leverage Zeekr’s state-of-the-art vehicle technologies and Mobileye’s autonomous driving technology to launch next-generation products for ADAS, automated and driverless vehicles (Level 2+ through Level 4), based on the EyeQ6H system-on-chip, for Zeekr and its related brands in global markets.
Zeekr plans to expand the installation of the SuperVision platform on additional vehicles, including next-generation platforms, and further increase the highway and urban coverage of its existing Navigation Zeekr Pilot (NZP) systems. To date, highway NZP based on SuperVision is active in more than 150 cities across China.
“The partnership with Mobileye has provided industry-leading intelligent mobility solutions to Zeekr users in the past few years,” said Andy An, CEO of Zeekr. “We will hold a more opening-up cooperation and strengthen the collaboration with Mobileye in the future, to reach new technological milestones and provide a better driving experience for our users globally.”
NZP has been critical for Zeekr. Customer feedback has been positive, demonstrating the value of advanced navigate-on-pilot systems to consumers.
“This new chapter in the Mobileye and Zeekr relationship will bolster Mobileye’s efforts toward the localization of its SuperVision technologies in China while making such localized infrastructure, especially of road intelligence technologies, available for Mobileye’s customers in China,” said Prof. Amnon Shashua, Mobileye’s president and chief executive officer. “It also broadens the cooperation between the two companies to include next-generation products on a wide spectrum of product portfolios from Level 2+ through Level 4.”